Censoring Progress, Religiously

THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE AGES, the period roughly between 500 A.D., the Roman Catholic church dominated a politically fragmented and feudal Europe. Education was in the hands of the church, which discouraged learning among the masses, preferring that they remain ignorant, illiterate, and wholly dependent upon the church for information. The Bible was essentially the only book available, and only to the priesthood. It was copied and read only in Latin; all local and regional vernacular copies were forbidden. Any knowledge deemed contrary to Biblical teachings was forbidden. When Copernicus wrote his seminal volume "Die Siderus Orbum" (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies), he mandated that it not be published until his death, fearing the inevitable persecution by the church. Only upon his death, in 1543, did it become available, but only on the "black market". Galileo fared no better. In 1608, after he had used the first telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter revolving around the giant planet, thus proving that not everything revolves around the Earth, the birthplace of Christ, word got out. Galileo was was subjected to ecclesiastical trial, convicted, forced to openly repent his heresy, and sentenced to house imprisonment for life. Legend is that on his way out of the building, he uttered: "I still know what I saw". Three hundred and sixty years later, I, a teenager, using a telescope far stronger than Galileo's, showed the four moons of Jupiter to my adoring mother. She thought they were cute, like babies, hovering around their mother. I kid you not. Tragically, little or nothing has changed in our year of the lord, twenty twenty. The Christian faith, now post protestant reformation and fragmented beyond any hope of reunification, still suppresses knowledge in defense of scripture, clinging to the nonsensical notion that the Bible is the infallible word of God. Today's victim is not astronomical truth, but rather, biological. A high percentage of Christians, especially fundamentalist evangelicals, refuse to accept the obvious reality of human evolution by natural selection. Evolution, of course, is all around us, ubiquitous, self evident. Dog breeding, horse breeding, hybrid crops, for example. The argument that this isn't evolution because it is human engineered ignores the simple fact that humans are part of nature, and that evolution by human selection is, nonetheless, evolution. The argument that if humans had evolved from monkeys there would be no monkeys ignores that fact that evolutionary science does not claim that humans evolved from monkeys, but rather, that both species evolved from a common ancestor, which indeed no longer exists. I can recall fundamentalist friends of mine gathering together at dinosaur digs for the express purpose of proving that the bones were no older than six thousand years. Predictably, they failed, but remained undeterred, shackled to their precious, false convictions. Nature, as revealed by science and concealed by religious dogma, presents a surpassingly beautiful, coherently consistent panorama of phenomena, worthy of our deepest devotion. Our creator gave us the faculties to explore and understand the world. Religion served its purpose during humanity's earliest, most primitive stages of intellectual and cultural evolution, by providing comfort and inspiration and organization in a world our ancestors found frightening and forbidding. For the sake of enhancing knowledge and progress, the time for religion has long since passed, and the time to elevate science to the highest level of our devotion has long since come. There are hopeful signs. Today's Catholic church operates one of the most ambitious astronomical research projects in the world. Millions of Christians now accept scripture as "symbolic", not literal. Perhaps, and we can hope, that this is in itself an indication that slowly, but inexorably, religious dogma is succumbing to scientific reality.